Learn to roller-skate? All it took was one fall to put me off wheels forever. Learn to ski? Down a hill? You're kidding, right? It was cold and I was wet; that was enough of that. Learn sign language? I missed a class and fell forever behind; good-bye ASL.

In fact I've always been good at knowing when to quit, except when it comes to marriage. I can't seem to stop loving my husbands, former and present, even when there is ample evidence that:
1. They don't love me, and
2. They don't love me "in that way."

For years The Husband would ask me every once in a while, "If Husband #1 showed up and said he wanted you back, would you go?" I always said "Nope," even when I really meant, "In a heartbeat."

What's that saying? I think it's, "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds."

But this summer ... I don't know. This summer, not so much. This summer feels suspiciously like somebody's idea of summer, but not mine.

"We haven't done anything," moans Miss Thing at me, exasperated. And she's right; we haven't. We've gone to the beach exactly once. Ditto for cook-outs. Horseback riding, which I even said yes to when Miss Thing asked me, nope.

Working in the yard? Please. Dinner and jazz on Friday nights at Mateo's? Uh uh. Company over for drinks? Yawn.

Miss Thing and I walk around the neighborhood in the darkening evenings, and talk. We watch the bats fly overhead, we try to catch a firefly, we say Hello to the dogs on their walks, and then we go home and I read, or I watch TV, and then I go to sleep. I watch TV. Since when do I watch TV in the summertime? It's summer, for God's sake; there is nothing on that is remotely worth watching.

And yet. This year, I can't seem to work it up for summer. It's Friday night and right now I feel like everybody on the planet has something to do, but not me. I think this ought to bother me more than it does.

I think, Shit, if I just can't be bothered to in the middle of summer, what on earth will I be like when it's winter?

I think, Who cares?

I spend too much time sitting in ERs, in the offices of various specialists and in the office of my pediatricians, staring at my feet and listening to babies crying and waiting to see a doctor who will most likely thank me for coming, tell me it's nothing or tell me to hope for the best before taking my $15 co-pay, bestowing hearty good wishes that I have a great rest of the day, and firmly closing the office door behind me.

Moo especially it seems cannot withstand any sort of virus or bacteria. Perpetually tired, he complains of headache, aching knees, hurty ears, sore throat, insomnia, various aches and pains. He rises from his couch at 6:45 a.m. and stumbles off to school, does whatever it is they do in high school these days for 6.5 hours, before coming home and collapsing again, spent. Sam, Girlfriend #1, said to me a couple of years ago, "He has the constitution of a sick worm." Not very poetic, but fairly apt.

I have a countertop laden with prescription medications, over-the-counter headache and cold and allergy and stomach ailment medications, all-natural homeopathic potions, naturopathic liquids. I disseminate them all stealthily, sneakily, in the middle of the night or when I am alone in the kitchen for a minute, like a a poisoner, into glasses of juice and cups of soup, cooked in casseroles, sprinkled over cereal.

But both kids know what I'm doing and manage to resist even my most underhanded methods, to the point where Moo will barely ingest anything I give him that has been opened or poured into a glass.

No amount of disguise will fool him into believing that he really cannot taste the colorless liquid I poured into his Gatorade, and he will take the glass from me, pour it down the sink and get himself another he can trust has not been defiled with healthful ingredients.

I wish I could slice both kids in half, hose them down with some warm, salty water, spritz a little Lysol in their various cavities and sew them back up, better than new: healthy.

The funny thing is that their compromised immune systems don't seem to bother them at all. They don't feel good and they don't expect to feel good, and that's mostly just fine with them. Maybe feeling like crap is still a good time for them; a day off; a holiday; a car ride to the doctor and then a car ride home; an afternoon spent sleeping instead of studying; Mom being extra nice. Ten days of some sort of antibiotic, or two days of a quiet house and eggs for dinner, and then the countdown until the next fever, or cramp, or stomach ache. Until the next big adventure.

On Sunday afternoon I'd had a premonition of this visit: Herself's sudden, intractable crabbiness--extreme even for her--and I tried to prepare myself for what might be coming, though too bad that at that point it did not occur to me to try to prepare Herself, to give her a preventive dose of Advil, or Imitrex, or Migranol, or Relpax, or Treximet. No; I just held my breath and thought, "Maybe not this time."

I call the school and say, "I hope she'll be in tomorrow" and I try to believe it, though I don't believe it because there was something about that Look that said, "Now you're in for it." All day long the Shade of Herself lies in bed, in the dark, blinds closed and curtain drawn, a pinched look on its face. Every few hours I try a different drug, or drugs, and none of them do a thing.

On Tuesday the Shade comes downstairs in the morning dressed for school, hair brushed. I look at it and say, half laughing, "You're kidding, right? You think you can go to school today?" The Shade looks at me and knows that I know what it is, and bursts into tears. "Go back to bed," I say. After a while I get dressed and go into the office. I call home. No answer. I think how stupid I was to leave home, how stupid, but I stay at work anyway. I call the doctor and say, "This is day two and nothing is working; what should I do?" and the nurse says, "Take her to the ER."

When I get home the Shade puts on a robe and comes downstairs, even more pale than it was that morning. Herself is gone entirely and when I look into the eyes that used to be hers, I see enormous pupils and nothing else. "Do you want to go to the ER?" I say, meaning "I want to take you to the ER," and it says, "No." So I don't. I wait, thinking, "Tomorrow she will be back." The Shade gets into bed with me early in the morning, and lies quietly next to me and sighs, softly.

When I get up I call the school again. I go upstairs. "I can't sleep," it says. "And when I do I have horrible dreams." I don't know what to say back. I can't say, "I know," because I don't. I can't do anything that will make a difference or make the pain lessen even a tiny bit. I can't do anything at all but worry and check every couple of hours to make sure the Shade still breathes. "I'm sorry," it says to me, in tears. I make an appointment with the pediatrician and get the Shade out of bed and dressed and into the car. An examination, a strep test, and an hour and a half later we are released back into the sunny day with a clean bill of health and the pain that will not go away.

That night the Shade comes downstairs for dinner with Moo and me, and doesn't eat. I turn off the lights but the Shade wears sunglasses anyway. It sleeps with me the whole night and I wake up every couple of hours and clasp its hand, just for comfort, and it clasps my hand back.

On Thursday morning I call the school say "Not today," and I say to the Shade, "We're going." And I make it get dressed, get in the car with me, drive to the hospital. We sign in, sit in a room that is gradually filling with sick people. We are finally called and a nurse weighs the Shade, takes a pulse, blood pressure, says, "You missed this whole week of school? Wow, will YOU have a lot of work to make up!" and I want to slap her. "Stress," I hiss, "is a trigger." And we go back to the waiting room and do not get called again. After three and a half hours the Shade says to me, "I want to go home." And so we do.

The Shade has dinner with Moo and me and because I made the most comforting comfort food I can think of (pasta and potatoes), it eats. We sit in the dark and the Shade wears sunglasses, and gets up abruptly and goes upstairs. I clean the kitchen and go up to check, and the Shade is sitting on Herself's bed, staring at nothing. My heart jumps and I say, "What's the matter?" Then I see that the Shade is crying. Sobbing. "My. Head. HURTS. I can't stand it."

I get it out of bed and undressed and into the bathtub, where I run water as hot as I can stand it and wash the Shade's hair, gently, and give it a bath. Afterwards I comb its hair, gently, and think about how long this could last. I am very, very tired but I feel guilty falling asleep, though I fall asleep anyway.

The next morning I call the school. When I go upstairs, the Shade is lying in my bed wearing sunglasses, watching television, a pale invalid. I go back downstairs and work. Mid-afternoon the Shade comes downstairs; the sunglasses are off. "Hey," it says. It sits down in the chair opposite me and looks at me and when I look back I see Herself. She is home. She has been gone for almost five days, for one hundred and six hours, but she is home now. "I'm hungry," she says, looking past me into the kitchen. "Can I have a sandwich?"

In fact neither Moo nor Herself have been baptized, and I have not been a practicing Catholic for all my adult life. Though the nuns and my mother told me, "Once you are baptized Catholic, you are always Catholic," making Catholicism kind of on a par with the herpes virus ... once exposed, you never really recover. The idea of "always and forever a Catholic" used to both thrill and alarm me, the way the idea of "God sees everything you do" used to, back when I was still on speaking terms with God instead of strenuously avoiding all attempts at contact.

Nevertheless every year before Ash Wednesday comes around, Moo and I decide what it is we should Do Without, to acknowledge, at least, Christ's forty days and nights in the desert and his triumph over the ultimate temptation and in successfully raising the bar impossibly high for the rest of us.

Herself refuses to play. One year I gave up swearing and she said, encouragingly, "Mom, that's going to be so hard for you!" And it was. One year I gave up dessert, but soon realized that for my body, dessert signals "stop eating now," and without it I just keep going. I gained ten pounds by Easter. Last year I thought about giving up wine but was afraid I'd turn to child abuse instead, so I gave up biting my fingernails, the ultimate Bad Habit.

One year Moo gave up soda. If left to his own devices Moo would drink Diet Coke at every meal, including in his cereal at breakfast, so it was serious. I don't remember what he did last year, but this year he has decided to become a vegetarian for Lent. Forty days without Five Guys, without ham sandwiches for lunch, without meat-lovers pizzas. Forty days without Buffalo Philly chicken wings.

I applaud his desire to mortify the flesh, so to speak, but I cannot imagine how I'm going to feed him for the next month and a half. Jesus fasted, though somehow I don't think that idea will fly with Moo. Chicken is out, obviously, and he will not eat fish. Nor does he care for salad and most vegetables. Spaghetti five nights a week? Vegetable-stock soup? Beans, done a thousand ways? Soy protein shakes?

Stay tuned.

I am sitting in the kitchen post-dinner staring at my empty glass and willing more wine into it. It's not working. I have a headache and a scratchy itchy throat; I am teetering on the verge of official illness.

Herself is flailing around the room talking on the phone with a friend. "Lonely? How can you be lonely? Is that why you like a sixth grader?" The travails of middle school.

It hasn't been the best week. "Huh," said my dentist's hygienist, looking at my tongue. "Something's making your intestines unhappy. And your liver needs a detox." Moo's cars tires have reached the end of the road (ha ha). My car does this funny thing when I stop at a light. I need new wipers and I'm running out of wiper fluid.

Twilight peed on my kitchen rug, the bag of newspapers in the kitchen, both kids' backpacks and Herself's winter jacket, and broke the halo off my statue of Saint Gertrude, patron saint of cats.

On Tuesday while I headed off after work to pick up my slugs, an older, very hairy guy on a bicycle was directly in front of me, and his pants kept falling down. For six blocks, his ass crack was directly in front of me no matter what I did. All attempts I made to change lanes, hang back, or pass him were thwarted by a taxi driver who must have known what I was doing and made sure I could not escape.

Yesterday I spent a large part of my day sitting in doctors' waiting rooms. During one appointment, my eye was anesthetized and an ophthalmologist dug aroung in it with a pair of tweezers, extracting calcium deposits and what must have been a pound of eyelashes. "Your eyeball must be wrinkled like a sharpei!" she said cheerfully, waving the tweezers for emphasis. "Every eyelash you lose just gets stuck in it!"

I got a call from Moo's school saying that he missed his first two classes today. He said he most certainly did not. "Call them, Mom!" he urged me, looming over my palsied hand as I dialed. I called the extension the recorded voice gave me, which it then told me was an invalid extension. The other absentee line just rang and rang and rang.

It looks like Moo might actually want to go to college after all, which is great except that I haven't filled out one form for financial aid, or even given any thought to actually paying for college. I guess I just assumed he'd live with me all his life.

My head hurts, my eyeball hurts, and if you'll excuse me, this wine glass is not going to fill itself.

I wake up at 3:30. Izzy is under the covers curled against my stomach and she's like a heater with fur. I nudge her so she moves away.

I wake up at 5:30 and I say out loud, to nobody, "Oh, that's what time it is." My shoulder hurts.

I open my eyes and stare into the faces of Izzy and Bob, who are staring at me. Bob sits on my chest, staring. He mews at me; it's past time for breakfast. The sun is well up. It's 7:30.

I have been dreaming about Moo: that he doesn't play lacrosse, he plays football; that in fact it is not really football, it is another game, one in which all the players are given a short wooden bat and they whack each other with them until somebody wins. The mascot for Matt's team is a buffalo, and its hooves are also hands. The mascot for the other team is a centaur. Both teams mass at opposite ends of a huge playing field that for some reason makes me think of Gettysburg and Pickett's charge. Herself appears; she has gotten a game program so we can keep track of who is down, and who wins.

The cats jump down to the floor, jump back up on the bed, jump back down, wander around the bedroom and watch me, waiting, while I yawn and think about how the right side of my head feels like I got hit with one of the bats in that game I dreamed up. It's what I get for drinking nothing but coffee and wine yesterday, I guess.

I get tangled up in my robe as I go downstairs to feed everybody; it's quiet. Twilight, waiting in the kitchen, sees Izzy and runs off.

There is a letter on the kitchen table. I sit while I drink my coffee and read it. It's a love letter. It says, "I love you and everything about you." It is from Herself, and it comes to me with a pang that makes my stomach jump: I haven't bought any Valentines this year. Not one. And here is this letter for me, the undeserving. The cynical. The one for whom the phrase "true love" translates to "yeah, right."

Now I remember what she said before I fell asleep. We'd been having a teasing, sleepy, after-Keno, late night conversation. I said, "You know you'll be so sad when I'm dead; you'll tell your kids, 'My mom was the best.'" And Herself replied, "Yeah, and she never hugged me unless I asked her to."

The cats lie in the sun on the deck, blinking and stunned, yawning. "I heard the birds singing this morning," said Herself, "and I thought it was summer."

Because today says, "Come on, you know you want it, and it's right here."

But it isn't.

Last Thursday it was 19 degrees and the wind made me shudder. Last week it snowed. Last week it was so cold that my damp hair froze when I went outside to start the car after my shower.

Today I worked in the yard, clearing and cutting and raking and sweating, remembering only after I'd bagged everything up and exposed the soil to the sun that it's too early for that; I should have left it alone; it's February, not April. It's winter.

And even though the blue sky and the breeze and the sun say, "How about some barbecue and a beer?" the shadows are long on the brown grass and the trees are still skeletons and there's ice on the lake. Today is a lie. But how nice to believe the lie, even for just a few hours.

I'm not in fact even responsible for one dishwasher, though it feels that way. Because whenever (and I mean: when. ever.) I travel to the kitchen with a dish to put into one of the dishwashers, they are either both full of (unrinsed) dishes haphazardly jumbled on the racks, or they are full of clean dishes that need unloading, and the sink is full of dirty dishes. I stand with my bowl, or plate, or mug, and what I think is "oh, fuck it," but what I do is re-load the dirty dishes to fit in some of the ones in the sink (gingerly picking through the soggy paper towels, kleenexes, used tea bags, straws, et cetera), put detergent in and start it washing; then I unload the clean dishes from the other dishwasher and put them away. Then I rinse off the dirty dishes in the sink and stack them next to the sink so that I can rinse off my bowl, plate, mug, and I stack that too.

Usually while I'm doing this sort of thing people wander in and out. Sometimes they add to the pile next to the dishwasher; sometimes they hand their dirty dish to me; sometimes they say, ha ha, "Aren't you nice!" (no); sometimes they say, "You know, we have people who do that" (no we don't); sometimes they avoid any eye contact at all, say nothing, and pretend they are in the kitchen only for the refrigerator, leaving with the dirty dishes they brought in.

Usually I try to act like I'm not really doing what I'm doing--after all, I'm not the cleaning service, am I? Don't I have an actual job? With an office? And work, waiting? Isn't a deadline calling my name?

But every time it's the same old story. It's ridiculous that I feel obliged to do it, but I do. I feel responsible. I see those dishes and right after I think "fuck it," I think, "well, it will only take a minute." What is it about a dirty kitchen that compels me to clean it up? Although maybe the mystery isn't why I do it; maybe the mystery is why nobody else does, and why they won't teach that trick to me.

It's better not to like anybody, or anything, too much. Not people, who leave, die, stop liking you, stop loving you, get old, get boring, get to be just like you in other words. Not pets, who make you sneeze, claw the furniture, claw you, claw each other, pee on your clothes, vomit on the carpets, get old, get sick, force you to make the choice to end their life, or do it themselves, without even letting you know it's the plan. Not food, which turns evil while appearing wholesome: the peanutbutter you spread on toast every morning--ol' reliable--harbors bloody-flux bacteria (ditto tomatoes and spinach); sushi gives you intestinal parasitic worms; and you can't enjoy tuna or beef without having to contemplate your role in the species' demise or in the flagrant waste of the earth's resources.

Shoot that poison arrow to my heart, as the song goes. --Oh, hold on; that's what February has to offer. I can hardly wait.

I think that it is unlikely I will ever be able to retire, and if I retire I will be unlikely to throw a party, unless it is the kind of affair where everybody brings me a bag of food.

When I was younger there were "can you believe it?" stories about older people who were retired, on fixed incomes and so poor they had to resort to eating canned cat food. I buy canned cat food now and let me tell you there is no way I could afford to eat it myself. In fact I split one can between three cats every morning and then I let Twilight have what's left, which is usually just canned cat food juice.

"Did you buy hot dogs?" asks Moo, peering hairily into the refrigerator. I did not; after I bought a week's worth of Little Friskies Special Recipe for Indoor Cats I was out of money. No, I will never be able to retire.

Interestingly, 3. was the opinion of a friend of mine as well, when we first met. We met on our first day of work at Sunset Magazine, twenty years ago, and after work I drove him to the Marc train, and on the way we talked, having instantly liked each other.
"I'm gay," he said.
All righty then. Hello, I'm from Connecticut! We don't just announce that kind of thing on the first date. But I knew I had to set the record straight. So to speak.
"I'm not," I replied, and he said, eyes wide, "Really?"
Really.

I guess he thought I was in denial. On the bulletin board in our department we hung photos of ourselves, and over mine he put a little cartoon thought bubble that said, "I don't have a penis and I don't want anyone else to have one."

At this point in my life he might believe I am straight, but I think that's only because he knows I don't actually have any desire either way. Somehow it happened that I am unmoved by brains, brawn, or beauty. It is a sad situation, I know, only it doesn't feel sad, it feels peaceful.

Herself's neurologist is a very interesting man, maybe brilliant, and he has a way of talking to me and asking questions that makes me talk back and answer them. While we should be discussing migraines, CAT scans, EEGs, we talk about my love life. During our conversations I have the idea that this is not the usual way it's done, but nevertheless I can't seem to stop myself from telling him stuff I don't want to tell him, and consequently he now knows my entire spotty history with men.

"You should follow your interests," he urges me, and I wonder what he means by that. And what he has in mind when he says it. "Women need tenderness," he says, and I think, "Isn't that what I have Bob for?"

Hail to the Chief.

Right now we--me, Herself, Twilight, Bob--are enjoying a fire in the fireplace. It's a pretty good one. Feeling nostalgic, I am burning the pear tree that stood in our front yard until we had to take it down last February before one of its limbs fell on a neighbor or, God forbid, on a neighbor's car.

After The Husband left home, I was dismayed to realize that I was on my own in the fire-making department. Fortunately I found out pretty quickly that all you really need is a box of firestarters, some newspapers and patience--but still, you wouldn't believe the thrill I got the first time I drank a martini while staring into the flames of a fire that I made. Ancient man living in a cave couldn't have been more pleased, in fact. What had once been the sole province of guys--the knowledge of the gods--was mine at last.

Bob is staring fixedly into the distance now; maybe he hears the thunder of approaching mastadons. Twilight stretches, yawns, then leaps suddenly into the air and onto Bob's back. I laugh and pour more wine into my glass. Time to put another log on.

The date ended when I got a text message from Herself that read, "MOM I JUST GOT MY [first] PERIOD NO JOKE." Really, you cannot beat that girl for timing.